TERRAFORMING TERRA
We discuss and comment on the role agriculture will play in the containment of the CO2 problem and address protocols for terraforming the planet Earth.
A model farm template is imagined as the central methodology. A broad range of timely science news and other topics of interest are commented on.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Deep Sea 'Mushroom' May be New Branch of Life

The initial explosion produced an incredible variety of life types which was ultimately decimated. today we find lucky outriders of what may well have been a rich grouping. Whatever it is it is new to science and joins many other oddities that will need to be studied deeply before we are finished.DNA work will help sort a lot of this out as our data basses steadily improve.Otherwise it is a neat and unusual creature.

Deep sea 'mushroom' may be new branch of life

By Paul Rincon

3 September 2014Last updated at 17:43 ET

The bizarre creatures were collected from the deep sea in 1986 during a research cruise off Tasmania

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29054889

A mushroom-shaped sea animal discovered off the Australian coast has defied classification in the tree of life.

A team of scientists at the University of Copenhagen says the
tiny organism does not fit into any of the known subdivisions of the
animal kingdom.

Such a situation has occurred only a handful of times in the last 100 years.

The authors of the article note several similarities with the
bizarre and enigmatic soft-bodied life forms that lived between 635 and
540 million years ago - the span of Earth history known as the
Ediacaran Period.

Jorgen OlesenUniversity of Copenhagen

These organisms, too, have
proven difficult to categorise and some researchers have even suggested
they were failed experiments in multi-cellular life.

The authors of the paper recognise two new species of mushroom-shaped animal: Dendrogramma enigmatica and Dendrogramma discoides. Measuring only a few millimetres in size, the animals consist of a flattened disc and a stalk with a mouth on the end.

During a scientific cruise in 1986, scientists collected
organisms at water depths of 400m and 1,000m on the south-east
Australian continental slope, near Tasmania. But the two types of
mushroom-shaped organisms were recognised only recently, after sorting
of the bulk samples collected during the expedition.

"Finding something like this is extremely rare, it's maybe
only happened about four times in the last 100 years," said co-author
Jorgen Olesen from the University of Copenhagen.

He told BBC News: "We think it belongs in the animal kingdom somewhere; the question is where."

The system used to group every life form on Earth encompasses several levels, or taxonomic ranks.

A domain is the highest taxonomic rank and below that is a
kingdom. Traditionally, biologists have recognised five or six kingdoms,
including animals, plants, fungi and bacteria.

Kingdoms are divided into phyla, which are grouped according to similarities in general body plan.

They resemble organisms from the Ediacaran Period, many of which were thought to be evolutionary dead-ends

"What we can say about these organisms is that they do not belong with the bilateria," said Dr Olesen.

Bilateria represents one of the most important animal
groupings, whose members share bilateral symmetry (their bodies are
divided vertically into left and right halves that mirror one another).
Humans belong within this grouping.

The new organisms are multicellular but mostly
non-symmetrical, with a dense layer of gelatinous material between the
outer skin cell and inner stomach cell layers.

The researchers did find some similarities to other animal
groupings, such as the Cnidaria - the phylum that comprises corals and
jellyfish - and the Ctenophora, which includes the marine organisms
known as comb jellies. But the new organisms did not fulfil all the
criteria required for inclusion in either of those categories.

Dr Olesen said the new animals could either be a very early
branch on the tree of life, or be intermediate between two different
animal phyla.

He conceded that they might eventually find their way into an existing group, because there was still so little known about Dendrogramma's biology.

One way to resolve the question surrounding Dendrogramma's
affinities would be to examine its DNA, but new specimens will need to
be found. The original samples were first preserved in formaldehyde and
later transferred to 80% alcohol, a mode of treatment that prevents
analysis of genetic material.

Accordingly, the team's paper in Plos One calls for researchers around the world to keep an eye out for other examples.

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About Me

Jan 2015 - 3 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled 'Paradigms Shift'. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.